05-4 Theology of the..

REFLECTIONS ON LUTHERAN WORSHIP, CLASSICS, AND THE TE DEUM 35
to find verbal parallels between works we are certain that Nicetas
of Remesiana wrote and the Te Deum. 24 Kähler examined (and
rejected) twenty-one such “parallels” and stated in his concluding
remarks with characteristic emphasis: “From the texts at any rate
it cannot be demonstrated that Nicetas of Remesiana had anything
at all to do with the Te Deum.” Furthermore: “It is no more
possible to make the case that Nicetas of Remesiana was the
author or editor of the Te Deum than it is for any of the other
names that have been connected with the Te Deum.” Kähler’s
caveat is still generally accepted and, indeed, there has been little
substantive discussion of the authorship question since the late
1950s and early 1960s. In many of the hymnals in which the Te
Deum is included today, Nicetas is listed as the author, but a
question mark follows his name.
Kähler made some telling observations but failed to face the
following question squarely: 25 How did the tradition of Nicetas’s
authorship, mentioned in just a dozen or so of the numerous
manuscripts, ever arise in the first place The development of the
pious legend about Ambrose and Augustine is easy to understand.
Ambrose was the most famous of all Christian hymn writers,
and Augustine was arguably the most authoritative of the
four great Latin doctors of the church. How better to explain the
origin of such a widely used hymn than to suggest that it took two
great church fathers to compose it 26 It is far more difficult to
explain the appearance of the name of Nicetas in the manuscript
tradition. Although Nicetas of Remesiana was a contemporary of
Ambrose and Augustine, he was not nearly so famous. There was
no monastic order that bore his name, or churches dedicated to
his memory. He is supposed to have written hymns, but they do
not survive, and his other works that have come down to us were
not all that influential.
One possible explanation for the presence of the problematic
word Nicetas in some of the manuscripts of the Te Deum, which
Kähler did not consider, is that it may not refer to a man of that
name, but is rather an infelicitous transliteration of the familiar
Greek word nikhthv", meaning “victor.” The word in its original
form would not, therefore, have designated the author of the
poem, but rather its dedicatee, most likely in the dative case, tw'/
nikhth'/ (“to the victor”). 27 The appearance of Nicetas as a proper
name in tenth-century manuscripts could, then, be the result of a
translator’s failure to understand that the word he saw before him
was a common noun (as opposed to a person’s name) in Greek. If
the first part of the Te Deum originally existed in Greek, as some
scholars have suggested (on the basis of its textual connection
with the Gloria), this would make especially good sense. 28 We do
have a number of manuscripts (some as early as the ninth or
tenth centuries) that contain the first twelve verses in Greek.
V.
It is quite likely, in fact, that we shall never know for certain who
wrote this hymn. While this will mean dashing Burn’s pious hope
“that in time to come Nicetas’s name will be a household word
among the Christian congregations whose hearts are stirred in
every generation by his matchless hymn of praise,” it is perhaps
appropriate that this hymn’s author or authors be designated
“anonymous.” One suspects, indeed, that whoever did write the
hymn was not nearly so interested in getting credit for composing
it as we moderns are in assigning the Te Deum an author. We, of
course, assign great importance to the claims of the author (rigorously
enforcing plagiarism and copyright regulations to protect his
rights), and are seriously concerned with the question of originality,
but it was not always so. It was not always thought that a great
idea or phrase or musical line was the sole possession of anyone
(one need only think of the ancient Greeks’ regard for the power of
the Muses as sources of inspiration). Johann Sebastian Bach (an
original genius, if ever there was one) copied the music of Italian
masters whom he admired. It is sometimes hard to detect where
they leave off and he begins. We might note, too, that Bach also
dedicated his own work to the glory of God and not himself. Some
of his longer compositions were never even performed in his lifetime—and
Bach may very well have known that they might never
be performed at all when he composed them. He was not concerned
about himself, but about his music. The artist who sees
himself in the service of a higher power, who is overmastered by the
great ideas he helps to bring to expression, and who is not driven
by a passion for self-exaltation, is a rare commodity today.
Our best sermons, it has been said, are
those in which we do not preach
Christ, but in which Christ
preaches himself.
nb
Since World War I, modern artists have tried desperately (and
to a large degree unsuccessfully) to break with the past, to find
new forms of expression, new, original messages. Indeed, this
attempt to break with the past could be said to be the very essence
of modernism. By and large these efforts have produced works
that are overly sophisticated and decadent, increasingly removed
from tradition and nature (for example, Cubism or Brutalism),
and addressed only to an elite audience. It is interesting, by the
way, to see how the pendulum has swung in recent years (some
historians have called our epoch “post-modern”)—back to classical
architectural forms (such as the Greek column), 29 to representation
(even photo-realism) in the plastic arts, to melody in
music, to narrative in literature, and traditional meters and
rhyme (mirabile dictu!) in poetry.
In the kingdom of heaven there is no such heavy stress on originality.
C. S. Lewis observes astutely:
Our whole destiny seems to lie in the opposite direction, in
being as little as possible ourselves, in acquiring a fragrance
that is not our own, but borrowed, in becoming clear mirrors
filled with the image of a face that is not ours.
In his High Priestly Prayer, Jesus prays that we may all be
one as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also
may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast
sent me. And the glory which thou gavest me I have given